If you didn't have a likelihood to go to the PAWp-Up pet adoption center in San Jose last month, there's no have to worry. The city announced that the satellite bunker will now remain open until February fifteenth.

Nine dogs and 30 cats were adopted from the middle at San Carlos and Third streets last month — falling in need of the ambitious goal of 100, but still pretty good considering the individuals who stopped by were probably on their way were to or from holiday events downtown.

“PAWp-Up has successfully brought our community together to provide loving homes for pets in need,” said City Manager Jennifer Maguire, who has adopted three shelter dogs herself. (Of course, that was early December when PAWp-Up opened; she might need more by now.)

The big goal is to get more animals into everlasting housing to ease overcrowding on the San Jose Animal Care Center, a facility that has been fighting more problems recently. But it’s not only adoption that helps. Donations also make an enormous difference. The Animal Care Center received roughly $65,000 in donations through its Hope for the Holidays campaign, which launched about every week before Thanksgiving.

The PAWp-Up is open at 93 E. San Carlos St. Thursday through Saturday from noon to five p.m. There are not any adoption fees for animals in PAWp-Up. For more information, including a listing of adoptable animals, visit bit.ly/SJPAWPUP.

SPARTAN CELEBRATION: It's harder to say that San Jose State is totally underrated after the Wall Street Journal ranked SJSU fourth amongst public universities last 12 months, nevertheless it's still a fun party game – no less than the parties I am going to – “Guess Who Went to San Jose State?” (Here's your starter pack: Stevie Nicks, Bill Walsh, Amy Tan, Joey Chestnut and Luis Valdez.)

Well, numerous really good answers to that query shall be honored at SJSU's Distinguished Alumni Awards ceremony on February twentieth. This 12 months's cohort begins with Oracle co-founder Edward Oates, who will receive the lifetime achievement award; D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert R. Rigsby, who will receive the Tower Award; Robert Rivas, Speaker of the California Assembly, receiving the President's Medal; Neat CEO Janine Pelosi, who shall be honored as Alumna of the Year (and shouldn’t be related to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi); and Bette and Dave Loomis, who will receive the Spirit of '68 Award for his or her support of several initiatives, including the Spartan Food Pantry and the Record Clearance Project.

The Spartans of Significance event shall be held within the SJSU Student Union Ballroom. Tickets can be found at sjsu.edu/alumni.

HOSTS WITH THE MOST: Congratulations to Laura Garcia, co-host of NBC Bay Area's morning show “Today in the Bay,” who has reached a 25-year milestone on the San Jose station. Garcia celebrated the anniversary on Friday morning's show alongside co-host Marcus Washington and colleagues Kari Hall, Scott McGrew and Cinthia Pimentel. It's also value celebrating. You can have a good time 1 / 4 of a century anywhere, but in the tv news business? This is something very special.

“Twenty-five years is a really long time to get up in the middle of the night,” Garcia said on Friday morning's show, which begins at 5 a.m., before softly segueing into kindness and adding. “I am really lucky to work with great people. You are only as strong as the people behind you.”

It's been quite a journey, she noted, with becoming a mother to triplets, some ups and downs, and numerous co-hosts during that point.

We have a good time the King's legacy: Commemorations and events surrounding Martin Luther King Day, including events, began this weekend The annual tree planting in our city forest on Saturday morning at Bruzzone Park in San Jose and a two-day Stop the violent event on Friday and Saturday on the Signia by Hilton Hotel. Caltrain's Celebration Train will depart Diridon Station in San Jose on Monday morning, intended for events in San Francisco honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In San Jose, children can study King's work Monday on the Children's Discovery Museum, where there shall be three performances of “Echoes of a Dream,” an interactive presentation that uses an African narrative style and features drumming, call-and-response -Songs are animated and slides. The performances included within the admission price happen at 11 a.m., 12 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. Meanwhile, visitors can paint and decorate a peace sign on the Neiman Art Studio. Further information might be found at www.cdm.org.

Originally published: January 18, 2025 at 6:30am PST

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SAN JOSE — A brand new residential tower in San Jose could help revitalize town's urban core by bringing a whole lot of residents and more vibrancy to downtown, officials said Thursday.

The Fay is a 23-story, 336-unit residential tower situated at 10 East Reed St. near the intersection of South Market Street and South First Street. The first residents could move on this weekend, based on David Hunt, chief development officer at Morro, an actual estate company that developed the positioning.

“Five years ago we made the strategic decision to move to downtown San Jose,” Hunt said. “This is an exciting place.”

Officials hope residents will help revitalize downtown after years of uncertainty following the COVID outbreak.

“A big part of our success has to be residential density,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said during an event Thursday marking the official opening of The Fay. “This is the first residential high-rise we’ve seen in a few years and it certainly won’t be the last.”

The Fay is situated in the stylish SoFA district, a middle for live entertainment, restaurants, bars, theater and art.

“This is an extraordinary building,” Mahan said. “The units are beautiful, the amenities are incredible, the views are breathtaking. The Fay will have a huge impact on the community.”

Here are the starting monthly rental rates for The Fay, based on the residential tower's website.

– Studios: $2,750

— One-bedroom units: $2,880

— Premium one-bedroom units: $3,530

— Two-bedroom units: $4,330

“We’re seeing a lot of excitement from renters and people interested in living here,” Hunt said. “We are very optimistic.”

The residential tower is offering eight weeks of free rent as an “early bird concession” for many who book an apartment now. The developer of The Fay also selected to accommodate all amenities on the highest level of the constructing relatively than devoting the twenty third floor to a penthouse residence.

“This allows every resident to have access to all of the building’s amenities,” Hunt said.

The top floor incorporates a rooftop pool, a fitness center and a clubhouse lounge where residents can hold meetings. According to Geri Wong, senior managing director at Newmark, a industrial real estate firm, the residential tower includes 5,500 square feet of ground-floor retail space.

Wong is searching for tenants for the retail space, which will be divided up for multiple retailers.

“We are already seeing interest from potential retail tenants,” Wong said. “We would like to see a food and beverage option for the corner area.”

In addition to the amenities within the constructing, local officials consider the SoFA district will offer much more enticements to residents of The Fay.

“SoFA is on the rise,” said Nate LeBlanc, business development manager on the San Jose Downtown Association.

Mayor Mahan believes the opening of The Fay is one other sign of change in downtown San Jose.

“We had the second fastest downtown recovery in the country, just behind Las Vegas when you look at foot traffic,” Mahan said. “People are returning to the city center at night and on weekends.”

The big challenge is finding a technique to create more activity through the day. The latest tower opens at a time when downtown San Jose is grappling with a declining office market, resulting in a shortage of office staff in town's central business district. Despite this shortcoming, Mahan sees positive trends.

“It’s alive,” Mahan said. “We opened more and more restaurants and bars. We have the theater district here. The city center is on the rise.”

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SAN JOSE — Major developer PG&E and top San Jose officials are eyeing green residential towers and data centers to pave the best way for innovations that may create green energy downtown.

Westbank, a mega-developer with global reach, has begun discussing proposals with planners in San Jose to construct residential tower and data center projects that will work together to provide green energy for the high-rise residential buildings that might rise in the town Downtown.

These ambitious proposals come at a time when PG&E is engaging with technology corporations and other corporations about how the energy giant can boost the production and delivery of additional and reliable energy sources to strengthen Silicon Valley's economy.

The idea of ​​placing apartments next to data centers that may generate energy, in addition to technology information centers, is becoming certainly one of the components of the grand strategy for a green downtown of San Jose and Silicon Valley, each of that are expected to make use of far more electricity.

“Ultimately, our housing portfolio in downtown San Jose will be over 4,000 units,” Andrew Jacobson, U.S. vice chairman for West Bank, said in an interview with this news organization.

At least two of those projects include a stand-alone data center that will probably be built adjoining to the residential buildings and can provide the homes with excess heat from the technology center that will otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

“Our focus will be primarily on the production of residential buildings and units in downtown San Jose, with a strong focus on the sustainability of these units,” Jacobson said.

San Jose is moving forward with what the town calls the Innovative Project Pathway Program, which makes it easier to construct projects downtown even when the proposed development doesn't quite align with zoning for a site, in accordance with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.

“We created the Innovative Project Pathway program to encourage the market to imagine viable projects that will improve the quality of life in San Jose and increase community benefits,” Mayor Mahan said in an interview with this news organization.

San Jose's modern development program is designed to advertise creative, high-density mixed-use residential, office, retail and entertainment projects. In this case, the creative twist is a knowledge center to enhance the green energy elements of the adjoining residential buildings.

“Westbank’s proposal is exciting because it addresses two of our biggest challenges in the same project: housing and energy conservation,” Mahan said. “This can be a net-zero energy project by using the computing power in the data center and then capturing excess heat to use to heat the neighboring high-rise developments.”

Here are the downtown San Jose projects that might put data centers next to residential towers in-built the West Bank:

— Orchard Residential on land often called the Valley Title site. Westbank's current proposal calls for 3 30-story residential towers that will add as much as 1,147 residential units in downtown San Jose's trendy SoFA neighborhood. The addresses are 300 South First Street and 345 South Second Street, with a further frontage on East San Carlos Street.

— Terraine, a 17-story, 345-apartment tower at 323 Terraine Street.

“We are the first major city in the country to commit to being carbon neutral by 2030,” Mahan said. “We are innovative pioneers.”

Coincidentally, PG&E is hosting an event called “PG&E Innovation Summit 2024” in downtown San Jose. PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe, Mayor Mahan and a number of other PG&E executives are among the many speakers on the daylong meeting.

How do data centers fit into this? Data centers require plenty of power to operate and use cooling towers to stop equipment and electronics from overheating. Excess heat is commonly released into the air and wasted.

Experts are on the lookout for ways to utilize the surplus heat from the info center process.

“An underutilized option is reusing waste heat to heat other facilities,” says a post on the Heat Exchanger website.

That's the approach Westbank is considering for the Terraine and Orchard Residential towers in downtown San Jose.

“Our long-term vision is to create multiple data centers and residential clusters. The idea is to connect them all together and create an energy system for the downtown San Jose district,” said Westbank manager Jacobson. “If we can harness low-cost, low-carbon energy, that opens up a huge opportunity for downtown.”

Canada-based Westbank has proposed several projects in downtown San Jose, a vision that originally placed more emphasis on office towers than housing.

Huge demand for housing combined with the collapse of the office market, undermined by the tech industry's slowing demand for jobs, led Westbank to change to residential towers in locations where high-rise office buildings had previously been planned.

“What we need is a thriving downtown San Jose,” Jacobson said. “San Jose has a great downtown. All that is missing is for more people to live in the city center, and on a large scale. We want to promote housing construction. We want to do more than just start a project. We want to get a lot of housing projects off the ground.”

The data centers, in synergy with adjoining residential buildings, would make West Bank's downtown San Jose projects more energy efficient – and a more attractive bet for financing real estate developments.

“We’re very confident in downtown San Jose,” Jacobson said. “It has great infrastructure, fantastic restaurants, bars and entertainment options. What’s missing from downtown San Jose is housing at scale.”

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SAN JOSE – A serious regional transit agency is negotiating to buy an office tower in downtown San Jose for its future headquarters. This deal could provide a significant boost to town's urban heart.

The VTA has chosen an office tower at 488 South Almaden Boulevard as the brand new headquarters of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency.

If those talks fail, the VTA has chosen an office complex in north San Jose at 1650-1700 Technology Drive as a alternative location, in line with the transportation agency.

The downtown San Jose office tower that the VTA is actively negotiating to buy is a 17-story tower with a complete area of ​​379,000 square feet. CBRE, a business real estate firm, is marketing the office tower, called Almaden Crossing.

The VTA has approved the terms of purchase of the constructing, which weren’t initially known.

In recent months, the VTA has been on the lookout for a constructing of as much as 500,000 square feet that it could lease with an choice to purchase.

“The commercial real estate market is in a tough spot,” Jessie O'Malley Solis, VTA director of real estate and transit-oriented development, told the transportation agency's board of directors at a recent meeting.

Because of this need, the transportation authority concluded that this was a superb time to search for office buildings that could possibly be converted into the VTA's future headquarters, Solis said at a recent VTA meeting.

“There are some significant opportunities for VTA to potentially move at a discounted rate,” Solis said.

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency is targeting 2026 because the time to maneuver into its recent offices.

“The intended use of this facility is office and administrative work,” in line with VTA headquarters requirements documents that Colliers has circulated. Colliers brokers Grant Zamudio, Paul McManus, Kevin Moul and Mike Lee are representing the VTA in its seek for space.

The transit agency's seek for a brand new headquarters has emerged at a time when the VTA has faced widespread criticism and skepticism over its attempts to bring a BART extension to downtown San Jose.

The BART project has exceeded its budget goals several times and is under scrutiny because of out-of-control costs.

The VTA plans to issue a bond to finance the acquisition, tenant improvements and any crucial renovations to the office tower.

The cost of the bond measure could possibly be as much as $135 million.

During the Oct. 3 VTA board meeting, Solis said that in her greater than twenty years as a business real estate skilled, she has never seen such a difficult marketplace for office constructing owners.

“This is the lowest price I’ve ever seen,” Solis said.

With the move to the Almaden Crossing Tower, the VTA also hopes to stimulate the economy in downtown San Jose.

“In our effort to be good stewards of tax dollars, we are fortunate to be able to take advantage of the current buyer's market while helping fill vacant spaces in downtown San Jose to enhance the vibrancy of our county's largest city,” Solis said in an announcement.

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SAN JOSE — A cluster of artificial intelligence firms has emerged in downtown San Jose, prompting local politicians and business leaders to seek out ways to spur technology growth in town.

The city of San Jose has launched a series of monthly meetings about what officials are calling an “AI ecosystem” within the Bay Area's largest city.

The meetings also aim to seek out ways to spur growth in downtown San Jose's emerging technology sector.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan was the keynote speaker on the inaugural event Wednesday night, where a key city official and a top IBM executive gathered for a hearth chat on the roof of a downtown apartment tower.

After the event, Mahan said in an interview with this news organization that creating clusters of technology and artificial intelligence firms in downtown San Jose is vital to growing the industry in town.

“Big cities have a density that brings people together, so there are serendipitous interactions between people who can work together to create new companies and new products,” Mahan said. “Innovation requires diverse groups of people to meet each other and have productive conversations.”

An estimated 23 enterprise capital-backed artificial intelligence firms are based in downtown San Jose, based on a study by industrial real estate firm CBRE.

These downtown San Jose AI firms have raised $1.1 billion in enterprise capital since their inception.

In San Jose, 89 enterprise capital-backed AI firms have raised a combined $4.5 billion, CBRE reported.

Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice chairman of products at IBM Software, was the industry leader who led a hearth chat to kick off the event, which took place next to fireside pits on the roof of considered one of the 2 Miro residential towers on East Santa Clara Street in downtown San Jose .

“AI has completely changed things,” Nirmal said in the course of the discussion. “AI is changing every aspect of life.”

While quite a few observers warn concerning the dangers of artificial intelligence and the hazards of the automation it unleashes, Nirmal suggested that artificial intelligence could possibly be seen as a force for improving lives.

“People are using AI in a variety of ways to improve their lives,” said Nirmal. “We all benefit from it.”

Despite these assurances, a growing variety of artificial intelligence experts and skeptics are warning that cutting-edge technology could possibly be used to exchange people and eliminate well-paying jobs. Some fear that artificial intelligence could even displace engineers.

“Will AI replace software developers?” asked Nirmal. He then answered his query by saying, “It’s more about improving an employee’s productivity than replacing them.”

What is for certain, says Nirmal, is that AI has begun to profoundly change many features of American life.

“AI will change the way we live, the way we learn, the way we interact, the way we trade,” Nirmal said.

Given these changes, San Jose leaders hope the monthly meetings will be a very important catalyst for a bigger AI presence in town.

“These gatherings will produce a growing and self-sustaining local community of innovators who will collaborate – and perhaps compete – to bring new AI-powered tools and services to San Jose and beyond,” a flyer said was prepared for the opening event which took place on September twenty fifth.

City and business leaders hope to create a stronger artificial intelligence workforce presence in downtown San Jose.

“Our goal is to help fuel a growing AI startup and innovation ecosystem in our downtown core, amplifying and accelerating AI efforts at City Hall, San Jose State, The Tech and other social and civic organizations “We want to use it to improve the world,” says the event documents. “We believe this can solidify San Jose as an AI capital and encourage companies to locate in our downtown.”

One solution to accomplish that, officials say, is to encourage the creation of a man-made intelligence incubator site in downtown San Jose. According to the mayor, such a location is currently being sought.

“We are very actively working on bringing an incubator downtown and leveraging the tremendous talent being trained here in our downtown at San Jose State University,” Mahan said.

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Six miles of San Jose streets were closed to cars and open to bicycles, pedestrians, joggers and skateboarders on Sunday for the third edition of Viva CalleSJ this 12 months.

The route, called “Parks to Roses,” stretched from Roosevelt Park at Santa Clara and nineteenth Street through downtown to the Municipal Rose Garden and Japantown. The event lasted from 10 a.m. to three p.m.

Text by Sal Pizarro, the total story may be found here.

Originally published: September 8, 2024 at 16:02

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OAKLAND — The site for a residential tower that might have enhanced downtown Oakland's skyline has fallen through attributable to a loan default, raising questions on the long run of the project.

The current proposal for the location calls for a 39-story residential tower at 2044 Franklin Street in Oakland, not removed from the nineteenth and Broadway BART station and the shores of Lake Merritt.

According to the plans of R2 Development, the project developer and land owner, the project would have included 425 residential units.

But these plans now appear to be in limbo since the loan for the property can’t be repaid.

R2 Development, which owns the property at 2044 Franklin Street through an affiliate that also took out the mortgage, is behind on repayments of a $6 million loan for the project, in keeping with documents filed Aug. 15 with the Alameda County Registry of Deeds.

According to county real estate records, the actual estate company received the loan from the Lone Oak Fund in 2020.

R2 Development had advocated for a streamlined permitting process for the proposed project under the provisions of SB 330.

The company, affiliated with R2 Development, purchased the project site in 2016, paying $14.3 million for the property.

The site currently features a two-story industrial constructing and an above-ground car parking zone. The developers planned to have the location graded to make room for the residential tower.

Since the corporate affiliated with R2 Development purchased the location eight years ago, the property owner has submitted several plans for towers of various heights at the location.

In recent years, as plans were revised and the project stalled, R2 Development began on the lookout for a partner for the project.

However, no partner got here on board and in recent months R2 put the location up on the market.

This news organization has reached out to the ownership group that holds title to the event site for comment.

Waves of foreclosures, record-high emptiness rates and falling rents are putting a strain on the Bay Area's existing office buildings and have derailed plans for brand new office projects across the nine-county region.

The default of the 2044 Franklin project in downtown Oakland is a comparatively rare example of a residential high-rise project defaulting on its loan repayment.

Many of the issues of the office market have spread to the residential high-rise development sector.

Exorcistically high rates of interest, brutal inflation and rapidly rising costs for constructing materials and labor are making it difficult for developers to implement their projects – especially large ones comparable to a high-rise tower.

The loan default on the downtown Oakland project is a sign that expensive money and expensive constructing materials can hamper housing projects, even in times of high demand for housing.

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